If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Generally, in journalistic reporting, you either ask a question and state the facts, allowing the reader to come to their own conclusion, or you bring attention to something (say, a new release of Fedora) and state the facts (what's new, what's missing, etc.), and allow the reader to come to a conclusion.

I think this article is a good example of the first.

Recently, it's been more like this**: Either ask a question and state the facts with a lot of opinion in between to sway the reader, or bring attention to something with a lot of opinion or unrelated/skewed information to sway the reader.

This is a sign the FFMpeg ecosystem needs a lot stronger and democratic leadership. The lack of a strong organization behind it is showing the problems lately, but it seems the symptoms were already there in the underground.

I think it's time to make a proper Foundation (name it whatever yoy may want), with a strong look at consensus from different project members and in collaboration with other organizations. Look at Linux Foundation, X.Org Foundation and Document Foundation for examples.

Forking is a good way to experiment different paths and showing different ways. It was quite good with EGCS that showed the technical superiority and got merged back to GCC, Libreoffice forked from OpenOffice and is starting to show the benefits of open government without a very big coporate head behind it.

The most weak point of FOSS is sometimes the lack of a strong organization behind projects. This can be a non-issue in hobbyist or small projects for some time, but not when your project gains lots of importance and grow in terms of complexity. I believe that's the main reason FFMpeg and other related projects are having organizational problems so they are forking...

At a long time, I think an Open Source Confederation must be done someday. I'm not talking about some geeky utopian idea taken from Star Trek, but looking at non-tech organizations out there that did something similar to that. This can make the community stronger and also put more pressure both in media and governments.

As far as I'm concerned, forking isn't nearly so big a deal these days because git is neat like that. The ffmpeg/libav thing was unfortunate, and I still don't think it was a great idea, but upon further thought it occurs to me that maybe more development will get done because less friction sparks fewer flame wars. (Some of the stuff that's come up on ffmpeg-devel has been pretty ugly.) Maybe we'll see a similar effect here?

There will be people that cherry-pick patches across party lines, so this may even end up a GOOD thing for the technical state of the art, if not the community/political aspects.